It’s funny how I go through phases with this. I think I set this site back up in January, and haven’t touched it since. You know, three posts within 4 days, then nothing until October. Every year I have a resolution that I want to write more, but if I wanted to write more, I would. It’s not like there’s a huge barrier of entry for me. I write here, I publish here, and that’s about it.
Either way, I’m here today to put words to something that I’ve been thinking about for the past few weeks. I look at my life over the last year, (Almost exactly the last year, actually), and I have realized that I kind of hit a downward spiral. I’m lucky that it didn’t impact me professionally, but my personal life was kind of a mess in a lot of ways. Much of the time and the aftermath during that time was focused on the events. What I missed. What I was so close to. What I could have had.
To a certain extent, that’s true. A year ago I felt I was so close to having everything that I wanted. I thought my future… at least for the reasonably foreseeable future was going to be what I’d always wanted. I was so close… and then like so many things in this world it fell apart and came crashing down. I fell into a dark hole of self-pity trying to put the pieces back together and grasping at what I’d almost had, as if if I just waited around long enough, it would happen.
I gave up control of my happiness.
All of this started as I was changing Jobs, my first major job change as a professional since college. In the past I’d skated between roles within the same department and company. Now I moved to a drastically different department in a company with a different style. “Culture Shock” was the word of the year for me, and I didn’t fit in well right away. When I tried to act the same way I did at my last company, where I was for lack of a better term, the golden boy.
I found my place as the quiet agreeable colleague, who was slowly brewing resentment under the surface to the point where I wasn’t stating opinions, I was just quiet and letting everyone else take the wheel. When I tried to take control, I had my legs cut out from under me. Eventually that kind of became my niche.
Over the last several weeks I’ve been rethinking the events of the last year. I’m not quite there yet, but I think I’ve realized what my life has been missing: Control. At some point I kind of just gave up control over my life and my work and just decided to go heads down and wait for things to be over. That isn’t who I am. I need some measure of control of the way I do things, of the way I live my life, or I’m going to lose my mind and myself. It’s difficult to imagine now that my mantra became “Wait For It”, as quite literally described by the mug and the banner on my Twitter account.
Well, fuck that. To quote Watsky “‘Cause waiting doesn’t work, and praying may not come through and hoping doesn’t work. So I will be the one to work.” I think I need to change that mantra. Instead of “Wait For It” it needs to be “Work For It” mug. Sitting around waiting for things to happen isn’t going to get me where I want to be. It’s not going to make me happy. So I need to work for it.